Abercrombie & Fitch might not be willing to pay you to not wear its
clothes, but you can still feel like part of the Seaside Heights gang
at Jersey Shoresical: A Frickin’ Rock Opera, which is playing at the
Bleecker Theater as part of the New York International Fringe
Festival. Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends exclusively
on how much affection — if any — you have for the Guidos and Guidettes who
are interested in partying, having sex, and, uh, that’s about it.

Writers Daniel Franzese and Hanna LoPatin have recreated the series’s
famous scenes and stoked-up attitude, and strewn the result with more
of the group’s barely literate lingo (DTF! Gorilla Juicehead! Smoosh!)
than seems healthy for any purveyors of the English language. But
what they haven’t done is give their concept the bold theatrical life
or creativity that it needs to come across as more than an obligatory
tie-in to an unlikely cultural phenomenon.

So forget right away about memorable speeches or songs. The action is
a loose collection of vignettes powered mostly by buzzwords and
impenetrable Italian-American accents; the score is monotonous music,
often barely qualifying as rock, wedded with lyrics too simplistic to
consistently generate even eye-rolling pleasure. Things do not get
much wittier than “’You taste like herpes’ / ‘You smell like beef
jerky’”; though one song, “Bitch in a Bed,” attempts an honest
emotional connection with the character singing it (Sammi, as played
by LoPatin the closest thing to a human being onstage). The show is
filled instead with costume- or make-up-provided rippling muscles,
bumping and grinding galore, and a general sense of libidinous chaos
that the director is only occasionally able to wrangle into laughs.

The cast, however, is a game group. Franzese is a fine and funny fit
as Ronnie, Mike Ciriaco makes a delightfully bewildered Vinny, Mark
Shunock is a deadpan-stolid Pauly D, and Karen Diconcetto lets Snooki
be sympathetic without pandering to her casing of absurdity — no easy
feat. Max Crumm, of the semi-recent revival of Grease, is cast as
Mike (aka "The Situation"), and is better at lifting his shirt to
reveal his six-pack than negotiating the songs that sit well below his
vocal and dramatic range. The most satisfying cast member overall is
Derrick Barry, who is best known for impersonating Britney Spears on
America's Got Talent: As J-Woww, he's solid sass, singing
spectacularly and looking at once more feminine than the other women
and more masculine than the other men.

Barry’s centerpiece number is a stage-filling valentine to Vinny’s
most enduring attributes, the significance of which will seem
shockingly minimal to anyone not richly versed in Jersey Shore Lore.
It's Jersey Shore's most honest and effective expression of
nonsensical fun, but it's so disconnected from reality that it might
as well be in a revue rather than a book show. The rest of Jersey
Shoresical is the same, a too-appropriate embodiment of its subjects:
Nice to look at while soused, but not particularly memorable once
you've sobered up.

If all of Jackie Ruggiero Jacobson’s play American Mud were like 10
minutes near its end, it could be engrossing. That’s when Adamaris
(Jacobson), a "perfect" clone woman who’s the Republicrat Party 2012
presidential nominee, is interviewed by Katie Couric. Her experience
is a combination of those received by Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin
in the 2008 cycle: inciting and condescending, probing deeply but
retrieving nothing of value. As Adamaris paddles through the ocean,
dodging sharks while trying to catch Couric’s boat constructed from
issues of The Economist (a long story), she poetically rails against
the treatment of women in politics and laments that, like so many
before her, her only contribution to the history books is destined to
be as a footnote.

This is Ruggiero’s clearest and most insightful statement amid 70
other minutes of, well, muddy storytelling and inchoate ideas.
Adamaris is trapped between the opposing forces of the modern
progressive woman named Charlotte (Anjoli Santiago) and the original
but wary trailblazer, Susan B. Anthony (Marjorie Goldman), with none
of the three able to agree on an ideal contemporary campaign strategy.
Boring as this is on its own, it's not aided by Charlotte's fervent
support of Adamaris's campaign and Anthony's skepticism of it,
especially when their concerns are voiced alongside the candidate's in
endless didactic speeches and pretentious exchanges that might as well
have been ripped from the animatronics displays at an underfunded
women’s history museum.

Director Jose Aviles tries to maintain order, but is thwarted by the
three inconsistent actresses, none of whom ever reveals a soul or
shares the universe with the others (despite sharing the stage for
almost all of the 80-minute running time), and especially the script,
which has nothing to say beyond condemning the eternal futility of
women daring to step into the public eye. The keystone scene is one
in which Adamaris gives back-to-back speeches, promising conservatives
she'll preserve life at any cost and liberals she'll maintain abortion
at any cost to the latter, ending with her unleashing a wild volley of
words to both groups at once. This causes you to neither learn nor
feel anything, and only weighs down an already turgid evening that
revels in its own cynicism at least as much as it claims Americans
wallow in their institutional sexism.